Another meteorological winter is drawing to a close, though it feels like some of us in the East are still waiting for winter to arrive (not a single inch of snow here in central New Jersey so far!).
A new NOAA modeling study suggests climate change is likely to disrupt Pacific atmospheric rivers, which are important sources of snow and rain for west coast states.
More frequent and intense rainfall events due to climate change could cause more landslides in the High Mountain Asia region of China, Tibet and Nepal, according to the first quantitative study of the link between precipitation and landslides in the region.
Human-caused climate warming increased the chances of the torrential rains that unleashed devastating floods in south Louisiana in mid August by at least 40 percent, according to a team of NOAA and partner scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA) who conducted a rapid assessment of the role of climate on the historic heavy rain event.
Last September’s widespread flooding in northeast Colorado, which saw just over 17 inches of rain in one week in the city of Boulder, was not made more likely or more intense by the effects of human-induced climate change, according to a new NOAA-led study published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
We sat down with Richard Artz, environmental scientist at NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory, to learn more about the new global assessment of air pollutants that fall to the earth in precipitation and in dry form. The assessment is available online in the journal Atmospheric Environment.
With NOAA funding, Ben Koziol, a CIRES researcher in NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, and partners, have built OpenClimateGIS, a new tool that will aid resource managers and others in the interpretation of climate data at the regional level. Today, Koziol and his collaborator, University of Michigan professor Richard Rood, will attend the launch of the White House’s Climate Data Initiative. Their new software, still in development, is showing promise for serving many sectors, including storm water planning (sewers get overwhelmed by intense rainfalls, which are on the rise in some areas) and emergency planning around dangerous heat waves (also on the rise in some areas).
Scientists aboard the NOAA Gulfstream IV aircraft are flying over the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast this week to measure air pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction to help better understand atmospheric rivers - narrow conveyor belts of water vapor that can bring beneficial water supply and snowpack as well as create dangerous floods.
Knowing when, where and what to grow or graze animals can be the difference between a bumper harvest and facing starvation. Rainwatch provides monsoon rainfall data in real time from monitoring stations and tracks the key seasonal attributes important for food production.